Commutation for brushless DC (BLDC) electric motors can employ Hall-effect sensors to sense movement of permanent magnets in operation of the motors. Hall-effect sensors, however, have not been successfully incorporated to encode DC motors to a high degree of accuracy and to a high degree of granularity without the use of additional position sensors and/or encoder hardware, and as such their usefulness in this context is limited. In many instances, the successful operations and application, a of motor-driven elements requires a high degree of precision and resolution in determining the position (and changes in position) of the motor-driven elements. This can be particularly important for small scale devices. One such application is in driving pumps and syringes to manipulate fluid samples in analytic processes, for example, diagnostic procedures.
There is a need, therefore, for systems and methods that allow displacement of a motor, for example, encoding of a BLDC motor, at a very high degree of resolution and positional accuracy. It is further desirable to do so with relatively simple hardware and software.